Is there any chance that future linux nvidia drivers will provide NvAGP support for the "PT880 pro" chipset ?

I see PT880 is supported, and i was a little confused at first why my motherboard (4coredual-sata2, PT880 pro/ultra) didn't work with NvAGP. I've tried compiling my kernel without pci-e and with agpgart as a module, all without success.

Linux agpgart does work with this board, but "suspend to ram" is broken.
Thanks.

stevenaaus

01-16-09 03:00 PM

Re: PT880 pro NvAGP support ?

This chipset is fairly amazing actually (the Via PT880 PRO chipset simultaneously supports AGP and PCI-E - and also DDR and DDR2. Because of it's complexity, it was released to market a little late, and never took off). Had my 4COREDUAL-SATA2 going for a month now without any flakes, playing Quake 4 on my GeForce 6600, and compiling kernels, etc. They did a great job and it's a shame it's not supported by NvAGP. I wasn't sure about how this budget board would perform, but it's Sata2 support makes my new hard-disk zoom along nicely, and the Core 2 Duo is easily the fastest thing around. I get around 100fps benchmarking the id Q4-1.4.2 benchmark on high settings at 1024x768. Not too flash.. as the linux SDL port runs considerably slower that the win32 version i think.

<rant>
It's hard to fathom why the industry switched to PCI-E anyway, except to force people along the upgrade path. PCI-E and AGP appear to have comparable bandwidth, and all they have done is render obsolete every add-on card ever made, both AGP and PCI. It could be said that it was a general upgrade to PCI, but i cant see why, as the video card is the only common card that requires huge bandwidth.

Toms Hardware, with an empty sentiment found across the web: "It's true that PCI-Express offers no current performance advantage over AGP 8X. In fact, AGP 8X is only a couple of percent faster in games than AGP 4X and in non-games it doesn't matter at all. But the biggest advantage of PCI-Express is that it's the standard of the future".
Being forced to upgrade for no reason an "advantage" ? I don't think so.

Anyway, i guess it's no suprise. The whole consumer PC market is about forcing clueless users to upgrade. SATA, Intel's failed RD Ram stunt, m****soft's god-awful new operating system, and the stream of vacuous new games that demand faster GPUs. ;>
</rant>